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This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of
Love.
The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by
Nectar, "wine yet not existing"; Love is born before the realm of
sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the
Intellectual before the lower image of that divine Realm had
appeared; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being
consisting partly of Form but partly also of that indetermination
which belongs to the Soul before she attains the Good and when
all her knowledge of Reality is a fore-intimation veiled by the
indeterminate and unordered: in this state Poverty brings forth
the Hypostasis, Love.
This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not
Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet
illuminated: the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not
self-sufficient, but unfinished, bearing the signs of its
parentage, the undirected striving and the self-sufficient
Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle but not purely so;
for it includes within itself an aspiration ill-defined,
unreasoned, unlimited- it can never be sated as long as it
contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love,
then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the
principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an
element of the Reason-Principle which did not remain
self-concentrated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is
true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love,
therefore, is like a goad; it is without resource in itself; even
winning its end, it is poor again.
It cannot be satisfied because a thing of mixture never can be
so: true satisfaction is only for what has its plenitude in its
own being; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there
may be satisfaction at some given moment but it does not last.
Love, then, has on the one side the powerlessness of its native
inadequacy, on the other the resource inherited from the
Reason-Kind.
Such must be the nature and such the origin of the entire Spirit
Order, each- like its fellow, Love- has its appointed sphere, is
powerful there, and wholly devoted to it, and, like Love, none is
ever complete of itself but always straining towards some good
which it sees in things of the partial sphere.
We understand, now, why good men have no other Love other Eros of
life- than that for the Absolute and Authentic Good, and never
follow the random attractions known to those ranged under the
lower Spirit Kind.
Each human being is set under his own Spirit-Guides, but this is
mere blank possession when they ignore their own and live by some
other spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the
operative part of the Soul in them. Those that go after evil are
natures that have merged all the Love-Principles within them in
the evil desires springing in their hearts and allowed the right
reason, which belongs to our kind, to fall under the spell of
false ideas from another source.
All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are
good; in a lesser Soul, inferior in rank and in scope; in the
greater Soul, superior; but all belong to the order of Being.
Those forms of Love that do not serve the purposes of Nature are
merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they
Real-Beings or even manifestations of any Reality; for they are
no true issue of Soul; they are merely accompaniments of a
spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total
of disposition and conduct.
In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the
purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is
Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but
merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in
false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as
there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the
strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true
knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence- and
this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being
that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the
Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form.
In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the
authentic Intellective Act and of the authentically knowable
object- though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are
not these in the absolute and not exclusively these- and hence
our longing for absolute things: it is the expression of our
intellective activities: if we sometimes care for the partial,
that affection is not direct but accidental, like our knowledge
that a given triangular figure is made up of two right angles
because the absolute triangle is so.
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